How I ended up with nearly 700 downloads of my book
The weekend just passed was a bit of a whirlwind in the Indie Author world. July 1st heralded #IndiePrideDay and authors of all genres from all over the globe took to social media to promote the Indie Author movement. There were events, competitions, giveaways and special offers galore. This is the first year I've been able to celebrate #IndiePrideDay as a published author so I decided to offer my debut novel, a paranormal romance entitled Bound to Blackwood for free, all weekend.
To help spread the word, I created a HeadTalker campaign, paid for a small budget Facebook advert, hosted three takeovers on various platforms, and recruited a team of fellow authors and bloggers to give me a spotlight on their blog at some point over the weekend.
The campaign went live via KDP on Friday 1st July and ended on Sunday 3rd July.
Bound to Blackwood
was downloaded
679 times!
As I mentioned at the top of the story, I used several methods to get my message out there. Some of the analytics for the platforms I've used are a little more basic than I would have hoped, so I cannot disseminate the results from what I have called "other activity" - events, blog tour, tweets, shares etc. (Lesson learnt for future campaigns - look into a different universal link system for my Amazon addresses so I can get more in-depth results as to where these magical clicks came from). I can lay it out in the most basic of terms, however.
For anyone who doesn't know about HeadTalker, it's a way to have your message be echoed throughout social media, at a time of your choosing. Check it out here.
I decided to try for 100 supporters for a message that would hit social media on July 1st. I actually garnered 115 supporters with a social reach of nearly 2,000,000. The post that went out looked like this. All anyone had to do was click and they'd be taken straight to Amazon to download their free ebook.
From the analytics available, I've discerned that this HeadTalker campaign led to 296 clicks through to the Amazon page. One has to assume that most, if not all, of those clicks resulted in a download.
I paid for a Facebook Advert. I used targeting to aim the ad at the newsfeeds of people I felt would be interested in Bound to Blackwood. This included key words and phrases to narrow down users' interest - Vampires, Paranormal Romance etc - and I also targeted users who liked other paranormal romance authors. This is what appeared in users' newsfeeds. Again, one click and users were taken straight to Amazon to download the ebook.
I paid €10 ($11 or £8) for my campaign over 2 days, starting on Friday 1st July. The results of which are here: (special shout out to the one man who downloaded!!)
As you can see, although I "reached" 1309 people, only 45 of them actually clicked the link. (I'm going to assume they also downloaded). So each click cost me €0.22On the face of it, this is a little disappointing since its the only PAID service I used during the campaign and I would hope for slightly better results. However, on the positive side, more people at least saw the book, it might stay in their mind, they might recognise it if they saw it again. It's difficult to put any kind of value on those kind of social media "impressions," but the general consensus seems to be that this is not a bad thing.
Through various writing groups and online cooperatives I belong to, I recruited ten other authors to help me with a mini blog tour. By my own admission, this was a bit f an after thought on my part and I only gave myself just under a fortnight to recruit everyone. Those that did take up the call are amazing writers in their own rights, and I am eternally grateful to them.
I wrote a "media pack" for everyone, which was essentially an intro, the book blurb, a choice of two excerpts (one racy and one more PG), my author bio, all my social media links and most importantly, the buy link. I also provided them with graphics, and a lovely shot of me. With the exception of one blog (who was already booked but still willing to help) all the blogs went out on July 1st the start of #IndiePrideDay. These blogs were also tweeted and shared to Facebook via author pages and other groups.
Social Media Take Overs
I took part in 3 takeovers on July 1st. First up was a last minute slot on the main #IndiePrideDay event on Facebook. I was one of the first people on and things were a little slow - I suspect that this was because it was 8am in the USA.
The second 2 take overs were in the Paranormal and then Romance sections of the Brains to Books Takeover on Goodreads. Although Brains to Books are VERY experienced at takeovers, this was the first time they'd ever tried using Goodreads for a takeover. GR isn't as user friendly as Facebook and hosts needed to be able to use a little HTML to be able to include pictures and links. On the day, event organiser, author, Angela Chrysler sent a message out that she was copying all posts to her blog as she'd had an enormous amount of visitors. The count was up to 3000 by the time I even got the message, so one can assume that there were a lot more after that! (She predicted 5000).
Events are a great way to interact with readers - old and new alike. There's the opportunity to promote books, talk about your writing and things you're working on, play games, run competitions. Of course for me, it was an opportunity to promote that all important link to my Amazon page.
Whilst Goodreads is an excellent place for readers to hangout, it lacks some of the inter-activeness that Facebook allows. It's just not as user friendly, and despite sending links to everyone I knew, and some I don't (!), I know from feedback I've received that some people struggled to find the event, let alone join in.
Facebook posts
In addition to the blog tour, I posted the same spotlight piece on my own blog and shared that to my author page on Facebook. I then shared that out to a few groups I belong to. I made sure that almost everything I shared over the weekend originated from my author page.
Scheduled Tweets
I use Tweetdeck to schedule tweets - I utilised that over the IndiePride weekend, scheduling about 10 tweets at various intervals. I used the hashtags #FREE, #IndiePrideDay, #paranormalromance, #IARTG, #IBBS in combinations and each tweet had a different teaser picture. As you can see, I also gained 10 new followers and gained 7,758 impressions. Now, not all of those impressions were for tweets about my book - I also shared tweets about other authors and other amazing deals to be had over the weekend, but it all helps with my profile visibility.
So what do my results look like? Well... this!
All that "other" activity accounts for 50% of my downloads over the weekend. So while I was feeling a tad lonely at sometimes during those takeovers, they, along with my last minute decision to do a blog tour, were WELL worth the effort. All the info I posted stayed live over the weekend. I know a few people commented long after I'd left the event to say thank you and to let me know they'd downloaded the book. I assume others just snapped up the opportunity for a free eBook, and that's fine by me.
Well, all Indie Authors know, the struggle to gain visibility is very real. Getting the message out there was part of what #IndiePrideDay was all about. I decided to give my book away because I want more people to see it, I want more people to read it, I want more people to fall in love with the world I created, and most importantly, I want more people to review it!
Over the weekend, my rankings on Amazon went from practically nowhere to this: (They went a little higher, but I forgot to get a screenshot - doh!)
According to my Amazon author page, my overall sales ranking has also shot up over 80,000 places.
Now, I know Amazon employ some voodoo algorithms and these figures won't stay for long, but they're there for a little while, all helping to increase my visibility to the lovely, book-buying public!
I use a Booklinker.net link for my book. It essentially means I don't have to post a gazillion links to Amazon when talking about my book. The short link it creates will direct the user to the Amazon country page most relevant to them. This is fantastic and a great timesaver.
The downside to this particular service is that there are virtually no analytics available, save to tell me how many clicks I've had from each country... ever. I can't even filter by date to give myself any more insight in to what happened over this particular weekend.
Next time, I think I will look at other services that offer more in the way of analytics. For this campaign, I would love to have disseminated all that "other activity" data. I'm desperate to know where those clicks came from so I can replicate it all again- were they from specific blogs? Did they originate from Facebook, Twitter, even Goodreads? I have contacted support, but alas, it seems I'm destined never to know.
Final Thoughts
I'm a writer, we're all a bit weird. On Friday and Saturday, I was so excited about all the downloads, friends were kinda getting bored of me harping on about it. I was all like "hooooooray, people are gonna read my stuff!"
Then, on Sunday morning, another thought hit me..... "oh my God, people are gonna read my stuff!" I know I'm not alone in this thought.
I do know one thing - I don't think I would have been even half as successful if it wasn't for the #IndieBooksBeSeen and #IndiePrideDay trends and the enormous amount of support I received from other authors.
If you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear them. Please leave a comment!
